About Me

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Charles and I ran a short
movie that will probably be the last one I comment on in 2013: The Border
Patrolman, an archive.org download
of a 1936 production from Sol Lesser’s Atherton Productions (one of Lesser’s
many corporate identities), directed by David Howard from a script by Dan
Jarrett and Ben Cohen that seems to have originated when one of the writers
said to the other, “Hey! Let’s do It Happened One Night as a modern-dress Western!” George O’Brien, whose
career rivaled Johnny Mack Brown’s in its sudden descent from prestige roles in
major films (like F. W. Murnau’s masterpiece Sunrise and Michael Curtiz’ Noah’s Ark) to a long stint in “B” Westerns, stars as Bob
Wallace, a border policeman — it’s unclear what government agency he works for, but his job seems
to consist of riding along the fence separating New Mexico from the original
Mexico, which as of 1936 was just two strands of barbed wire stretched across a
line of thigh-high fenceposts (ah, how times have changed!), and busting people
for relatively penny-ante offenses like smoking in fire-prone parkland. This
part of his job causes him to run afoul of spoiled heiress Patricia Huntley
(Polly Ann Young, sister of Loretta Young and Sally Blane), who thinks nothing
of diving into the swimming pool of the New Mexico resort where she’s staying
in her tennis outfit, stealing someone else’s robe to dry herself, and
generally cutting a swath of destruction and misappropriation, secure in the
knowledge that her grandfather’s money will pay for it all. Granddad is
Jeremiah Huntley (William P. Carleton), who raised Patricia — that’s right,
this is yet another movie featuring the Magically Disappearing Parents — and
who’s spoiled her rotten, indulging her in her every whim except one: he
strongly disapproves of the man she’s become engaged to, lounge lizard Courtney
Maybrook (LeRoy Allen). Wallace catches Patricia and Courtney smoking in a
national park and busts them, then is forced to let Patricia go and apologize
to her when she comes on to his supervisor, Captain Stevens (Frank Campeau) —
whereupon Wallace abruptly quits his job as border patrolman in protest against
having to suck up to the rich bitch’s whims. It turns out, as anyone who’d seen
more than about three movies in their life might guess, that this is all a
blind; Wallace and Stevens are working together to catch a gang of jewel
thieves who are smuggling stolen gems across the border and using the New
Mexico resort as their base of operations. Needless to say, in addition to
being a lounge lizard, a male gold-digger and an overall creep, Courtney is
also the mastermind of the jewel-stealing ring; he has two associates, Johnson
(Tom London) and Myra (Mary Doran — who had a long career in the 1950’s playing
mothers, so it’s something of a surprise to see her young!), whom he’s told to
lay low in Mexico until the border patrol stops putting so much heat on the
area.

They’re getting restless, though, especially since Myra is in love with
Courtney and is understandably jealous of all the attention he’s paying to
Patricia. Polly Ann Young and Mary Doran look strikingly alike, and there’s at
least one casually dropped line of dialogue suggesting that at some point the
writers intended to make that a plot point, but instead they go the It
Happened One Night route of having the
heiress taken down by a hard-ass proletarian determined to teach her the
virtues of simple living. Jeremiah Huntley hires Wallace to “bridle” his
granddaughter — the script actually compares taming the wild heiress to
breaking a wild horse! — which Wallace does by getting word to the hotel
management that she is to have nothing: no cash, no gasoline for her cars, no drinks, without his written
approval. She rebels by running off with Courtney and agreeing to marry him
immediately in Mexico, which is just fine with him because he’s already stolen
a priceless piece of jewelry (we’re told it’s a necklace but onscreen it looks
more like a broach) and decided to get it across the border by buying her a
Mexican handbag as a present, concealing the piece in a secret compartment in
the bag, and thus making her his unwitting “mule.” The film is set in 1936 —
something we were made aware of instantly by seeing a car in the opening
establishing shot — and the final chase is done with cars instead of horses,
though the cars are convertibles so that Wallace, once the baddies shoot out
his own tires, is able to do a flying leap into Courtney’s car, take over the
wheel and get the now-subdued crooks across the border so they can be arrested.
The Border Patrolman benefits
from reasonably creative direction by David Howard, who shot the final action
sequence in Death Valley (and used it quite effectively, though the scene is
handicapped by the lack of a music score — albeit the sorts of sorry stock
recordings available to producers like Lesser might not have been much help),
but it’s taming-of-the-shrew plot line had already been done to death in far
superior screwball comedies.

Indeed, there seems to have been at least some
attempt to make The Border Patrolman what I call a “portmanteau movie” — one with a lot of disparate
elements seeking to appeal to as many different audiences as possible (a common
strategy of producers in the 1930’s and a far cry from the narrow “niche
marketing” most filmmakers pursue today, aiming their movies at one and only
one set of filmgoers!): it contains a screwball plot, plenty of Western
settings (and horses, even though the principals also drive cars) for the
Saturday-matinee crowd, a typically dry comic-relief performance by Smiley
Burnette (Gene Autry must have had that week off), who also sings two songs,
and even a Mexican band (guitar, chitarrón, violin and bass) who do two songs
in Spanish in the rather sad-looking cantina to which Courtney takes Patricia for the quickie
Mexican wedding he wants to put her through (only she threatens to derail his
plans when she gets cold feet and wants to wait). Charles pointed out that in
Mexico a cantina is a really sleazy sort of
bar to which women would be unlikely to go, but the place in this film is
raunchy enough one can well understand Patricia’s disquiet at her groom’s
insistence on marrying her in such a place. The film ends, of course, as you’d
expect it to, with the crooks in jail, Wallace restored to the good graces of
the border police force, and Patricia solidly attached to the poor but decent
Wallace, with whom she’s inevitably fallen in love; it isn’t much as a film,
but this is at least a good, solid piece of “B” moviemaking and probably helped
O’Brien make his re-entrée to the world of the major studios (RKO would sign
him after this one for a long-running series of “B” Westerns, with better
production finishes than The Border Patrolman but generally without this film’s quirky appeal).

Monday, December 30, 2013

At 9 p.m. December 29 I watched a
Lifetime TV-movie called Taken for Ransom, billed as a “world premiere” but apparently a film that was shot with
at least the glimmer of hope for a theatrical release. It was co-written by
Steven Edell (Jeremy and Elaine Edell, presumably his parents, are listed among
the film’s official producers, along with actress Tia Carrere, suggesting this
might at least have started life as a vehicle for her; she’s in the movie but not, surprisingly, as the female lead) and Harvey S.
Fisher, and directed quite capably by Barbara Stepansky (every time I see a
woman credited as director, especially on a film as good as this, I have hopes
that she’ll be able to crack the glass ceiling and get assignments on major
features — and usually those hopes are dashed). It begins with a “teaser” shot
of the heroine, Brooke Holton (Teri Polo), running through a wood in the middle
of the night, clad in a prison-like blue denim outfit, and then it cuts to an
earlier scene showing Brooke’s family life, seemingly happy, with husband
Albert Fuentes (Matt Socia) — an aspiring novelist who’s working on a book
about the Spanish-American War (obviously the real writers’ choice of such a recherché
subject for their fictional
writer’s novel is intended to tell us that either he’ll never get the damned
thing published or, if he does, it won’t sell for shit and he’ll still be
living off his multimillionaire wife’s money) and their kids Billy (Parker
Niksich) and Emma (Kenzie Pallone). Brooke, we eventually learn, is the founder
and CEO of Holton Industries, which makes cryogenic equipment so gases can be
liquefied and shipped over long distances, and both her home and work lives
seem to be going just fine until one day she’s driving her son Billy to a soccer
game when her cell phone buzzes with an incoming text message, she’s distracted
from the road to look at it, and just then a truck comes barreling down towards
her and hits her car. She survives relatively unscathed, at least physically,
but Billy is killed.

This sends Brooke into a depressive funk; after a typical
Lifetime title — “Nine Months Later” — we see her as a desperate basket case,
smoking three packs of cigarettes a day and staying smashed all day on alcohol
and pills (the latter she obtains from a succession of therapists whose
attempts to get her to face up to her real issues she blows off). We also see a
sinister pair of hoods, Carl (Paul Vincent Blue) and a tough woman who looks
like Klute-era Jane Fonda, stalking
her and getting ready to — you guessed it — take her for ransom. When she’s
kidnapped, she’s taken to a compound in a remote location and learns that the
head of the kidnap gang is a man named Jerry (Chazz Palminteri) — “as in Jerry Lewis, a very funny
man,” he says — both Charles and I
noticed his striking resemblance to Ringo Starr — and she’s being held in an
abandoned gym. Also being held with her is one of the gang’s previous victims,
a young man named Will (Luke Eberl) — his age is carefully unspecified in the
script, though he’s presented as too young for Brooke to develop a romantic or
sexual interest in her (in fact Luke Eberl was born in 1986 and Teri Polo in
1969, but they look closer together in age than that on screen) — who’s worried
that the kidnapers are going to mutilate him. At one point the writers insert a
macabre joke when Jerry tells Brooke they’re going to send her husband her
wedding ring to prove that they’re holding her (the “official” word is that she
killed herself — the kidnappers made her sign a fake suicide note that said she
was going to jump off a bridge), and when she asks if her finger is still going
to be attached to it, he dismisses it as “too clichéd.” The gimmick is that,
confronted with a gang of psychos who are likely to kill her at any moment,
Brooke is going to get over her addictions, pull herself together and regain
her personal strength as she looks for a way to escape and take Will — to whom
she’s developed a motherly attraction and started to see as the son she lost —
with her. She literally goes into training, learning how to run long distances
and climb ropes, and eventually she figures out how to break the padlock on a
door to the gym where they’re being held, she and Will stage their escape but
the kidnappers confront them, there’s a gunfight (Will has stolen one of the
gang’s guns) and everyone but Brooke is killed. She’s eventually rescued by a
passing motorist and taken to the police, but when they take her back to the
place where she says she was held it’s just an abandoned warehouse and there
are no dead bodies, no disabled car (she was supposed to steal the gang
members’ car to use in her escape, but it wasn’t working), no gym equipment and
none of the elaborate video monitoring setup that had kept track of her every
move.

The Lifetime synopsis on this movie — “She later discovers that someone
close to her may be behind her subsequent abduction and kidnapping” — hints at
one of the final twists but not at the second one [spoiler alerts!]: at first we’re led to believe that she was
kidnapped by gangsters hired by her husband, who was having an affair with her
assistant Michelle Gaines (Tia Carrere) and wanted to get his hands on their
money; but later we find out that “Jerry” was really a therapist hired by her
husband and Michelle to get her out of her blue funk with something called
“immersion therapy,” in which they would create a scenario that would put her
in apparent life-or-death jeopardy and thereby force her to regain her mojo and
get her life back together, and the other three people involved — including
“Will” — were all actors “Jerry” hired as part of the plot. I’m not sure I
really believe this weird twist ending — though it does explain how the crooks (or supposed crooks) could
be so sensible in some of their precautions and so slapdash in others (like
never replacing the padlock to the metal door after she breaks it off) —
certainly the husband-turns-out-to-be-a-creep-who-did-it-for-her-money ending
would have been more credible, at least in the Lifetime universe — but overall Taken
for Ransom is a quite good movie by
Lifetime standards, not a world-beater but a nice couple of hours’ worth of
entertainment that mostly plays fair with its audience despite the two big reversals at the end.
It’s also well acted; Teri Polo is credible as both the basket case and the
competent, high-achieving woman she turns back into as a result of the kidnap
scenario, and Tia Carrere is appropriately sinister enough that we could well
believe she’d be after both Brooke’s husband and her job.

Young cutie Luke
Eberl — described in a 2008 issue of MovieMaker magazine as one of “10 Young Americans to Watch” —
takes both the aesthetic and the acting honors, though; he seems genuinely
traumatized by the experiences, especially when he tells Brooke (as part of the
plot) that his dad paid the ransom the gang was charging for him but they
refused to release him, and obviously they were going to hold up his dad for
more money until he refused to pay and they killed him. It’s the same kind of
dual game Kim Novak had to play in Vertigo — as a person with sincere emotions and as a person hired to fake those
emotions for a plot — and Eberl acquits himself marvelously and he’s fun to look at. Incidentally, imdb.com put up
two “trivia” postings on this movie even before it was released, one about all
the titles that were considered for it before the rather lame Taken for
Ransom was picked (among the
others was Matrix — already used, and too
much of a giveaway anyway — The Holton File, Last Resort, Life Saver and Final Recourse, the title under which imdb.com lists it) and the
other saying it was originally written with the genders of the couple reversed
(a man as the basket case flagellating himself chemically over the death of his
child and his wife — presumably that would have been Tia Carrere’s role — as
the mastermind of the phony “kidnapping” to free her husband from his demons),
but the producers eventually decided it would have a better shot at dramatic
credibility as well as international grosses with a woman as the lead. They
were right; having the heroine a successful businesswoman married to a nobody
made for more powerful drama and made it more believable that the husband could
hatch a sinister plot to go after her money after years of feeling “unmanned”
by a relationship in which his wife made far more money and he basically lived
off her.

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Charles and I watched a movie I’d recently recorded from TCM
as part of a mini-tribute to Irene Dunne: No Other Woman, a 1932 production from RKO personally produced by
David O. Selznick during his one-year tenure as production chief there, with
Dunne billed over the title in the sort of movie you think you’ve seen before whether or not you have. It’s a
Warners-esque proletarian drama in which the principals all live in Steel Town
and work at, you guessed it, the local steel mill: Jim Stanley (Charles
Bickford) is a mill worker who’s gradually working his way up to foreman, Anna
(Irene Dunne) is the company bookkeeper and Joe Zarcovia (Eric Linden) runs the
time clock. Jim is in love with Anna but she’s unwilling to marry him because
she doesn’t want to be stuck in Steel Town all her life; eventually they tie
the knot and have a son, Bobbie (Buster Miles), but Anna’s determination to
make something of themselves and make a life outside Steel Town leads her
carefully to husband her husband’s earnings, keep most of them in a savings
account and get additional money by taking in boarders, including Joe. (For
much of the film I thought Joe was Anna’s younger brother, but he wasn’t.) Joe
is also an inventor who’s figured out a way to take the waste from steel
production and turn it into a new dye that’s more permanent than any other on
the market. Anna wants to invest the Stanleys’ savings into Joe’s invention,
but Joe is tired of having to economize and announces that he’s going to take
his latest paycheck and blow it all in one night on alcohol. As things turn
out, he blows it on something more than alcohol: he comes home with another
woman on his arm, and though he insists she’s just a drinking buddy and means
nothing to him — at least nothing that would threaten his and Anna’s marriage —
he feels guilty enough the next morning that in order to atone to his wife, he
tells her to go ahead and invest their money in Joe’s dye. Jim and Joe form a
company to exploit the invention, and within the space of a spectacular montage
by Slavko Vorkapich (who’s credited with “transitional effects”) it’s a
multi-million dollar concern with a factory complex of its own and both Joe and
the Stanleys are millionaires.

Only — wouldn’t you know it? — Jim’s still got
the proverbial roving eye; he ends up spending a lot of time in New York City
in “conferences” with investors and bankers, and during one of these trips a
gold-digger named Margot Van Dearing (Gwili André) gets her hooks into Jim and
starts an affair with him. Margot is really being manipulated by her actual
lover, attorney Bonelli (J. Carrol Naish), but — against Bonelli’s advice — she
ultimately demands that Jim either divorce his wife and marry her, or say
goodbye to her forever. Jim agrees but Anna doesn’t, and as a result Jim and
Bonelli (who’s serving as Jim’s lawyer) hatch a plot to bribe the Stanleys’
servants to give false testimony at the divorce trial that Anna was the one having the affair — even though it gets
pretty hard to believe when the man they produce as Anna’s alleged lover,
Sutherland (Theodore Von Eltz), is the sort of nerdy milquetoast who generally
inhabited stories like this as the querulous hotel clerk uncertain of the
morality of his guests’ relationships, not a partaker in adultery (either as
cuckolder or cuckoldee) himself. Jim not only wins his divorce case, he also
wins custody of Bobbie — ya remember Bobbie? — only at the thought of losing her child, Anna
freaks out in court and says she was
having affairs, and the court can’t award custody of Bobbie to Jim because Jim
isn’t his natural father. Then Jim
has his own hissy-fit and confesses in court that he set up the whole thing;
that his wife is blameless and he not only lied under oath but bribed his
servants to lie as well. For this Jim is sentenced to five years for perjury
and suborning perjury, and though he’s paroled after one year his company goes
under when its stock price plummets due to the scandals, and ultimately he,
Anna and Joe all return to Steel Town and the nothing proletarian jobs they
were holding down at the start of the movie.

No Other Woman, directed by the quite interesting J. Walter Ruben
with a major assist from Vorkapich and his “transitions,” is well directed and
competently acted — especially by Bickford, who’s just right for his part as a
hard-working proletarian in over his head among the rich — but the script by
Wanda Tuchock and Bernard Schubert, from an “original” story by Owen Francis,
is so predictable — and also so
annoying in its classism: like a lot of other movies of the period (including
many of Bickford’s other vehicles), it seems to take a perverse joy out of
crushing the ambitions of our honest steelworker whose only failing is a
fondness for booze and women. It’s one of those stories that basically outright
says to the blue-collar audience, “Don’t even think of going into business for yourself and getting
ahead. You’re precisely where nature meant you to be, and if you try to rise
above your place you’ll just make yourself and everyone around you miserable
and you’ll end up back where you belong, anyway.” The U.S. has always had a
peculiar attitude towards inherited wealth; we were sufficiently appalled by
the landed nobility of the United Kingdom that we inserted in our constitution
a provision that no American government official could ever accept a title of nobility — yet over
and over again we’ve gravitated to hierarchical arrangements in which wealth
stayed in prominent families from generation to generation, from the
slaveholders of the ante-bellum South and the “patroons” of early New York
state to the Rockefellers, Morgans, Chases, Fords, and now the Waltons (as in
Wal-Mart) and the Kochs. Indeed, if there’s been a change in the American
ideology it’s that we’ve even intensified our worship of money from what it was throughout the nation’s history
— and the notion of people being superior because they’ve had money in their
family for several generations has become at least partially sidetracked by the
idea that people are superior simply because they have money, here and now. A modern-day remix of No
Other Woman would come down less hard on
Jim Stanley than the 1932 version did — it would probably re-invent him as an
Ayn Rand character who lost all his money and then, because of his innate
superiority over the common run of mankind, made it all back again and more,
and in the meantime laid down the law to his wife that he was going to fuck any
woman he wanted any time he wanted and, precisely because he was a capitalist
superman, she wasn’t going to be allowed to stand in his way.

Friday, December 27, 2013

Charles and I ran a rather
quirky movie I’d picked up from the $4.99 bin at 7-Eleven: The Three
Musketeers, a spoof version from 20th
Century-Fox in 1939 starring Don Ameche (as D’Artagnan) and the Ritz Brothers
(not as the Three Musketeers themselves but as three tavern louts who drink the
Musketeers under the table and then impersonate them). It was directed by Allan
Dwan (who’d directed the screen’s most famous D’Artagnan, Douglas Fairbanks,
Sr., not in his version of The Three Musketeers but in the sequel, The Iron Mask) from a script by the usual committee: M. M.
Musselman, William A. Drake and Sam Hellman, with Sid Kuller and Ray Golden
credited with “special material” — i.e., they were the Ritz Brothers’ gag men.
It’s a movie I’d long wanted to see, mainly due to the raves it got from
Leonard Maltin in his book Movie Comedy Teams — he called it “the team’s best … a vivid,
entertaining musical comedy … remarkably faithful to [Alexandre] Dumas’ classic
story” — and it turned out to be something of a disappointment, entertaining
and amusing but only rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Part of the problem is the
film’s running time — only 73 minutes, hardly enough to get Dumas’ plot and the Ritz Brothers’ comedy routines and four songs in — and part of the problem is the
Ritz Brothers. They were capable and energetic, but they peaked early in their
films — with their 1934 two-reeler for Educational, Hotel Anchovy — and they had the misfortune of arriving in
Hollywood when the market for two-reelers was drying up and comedians were
being forced into longer features, often padded out with elaborate plots and
musical numbers. Charles said he thought of the Ritz Brothers as a sort of
bastard cross-breeding of the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges, but they
lack the sophistication and sheer anarchic zaniness of the Marxes and the
almost balletic precision of the Stooges’ aggressive, violent slapstick.

It
also doesn’t help that, unlike the Marxes (even though they were brothers) or
the Stooges (two of whom were brothers), the Ritzes never created characters
differing from each other; one can watch just about any of the Ritz Brothers’
movies and, unless they actually address each other by name, not be able for
the life of you to tell which Ritz is which. The result is a film that lacks
the sheer zaniness the Marx Brothers could have brought to a Three
Musketeers spoof in the 1930’s (or
Mel Brooks could have in the 1970’s); instead it’s a clever film, well staged
by Dwan and benefiting from the 20th Century-Fox infrastructure. The
sets representing 17th Century France are absolutely convincing
(probably a lot of them were pre-existing leftovers from other big costume
epics) and the cinematography by J. Peverell Marley is absolutely gorgeous —
and the edition we were watching was a commercial DVD that did full justice to
Marley’s work. The supporting cast was also quite good: the bad guys (and gals)
were cast mostly seriously — Miles Mander as Richelieu, the great Lionel Atwill
as De Rochefort and Binnie Barnes as Lady de Winter (both a stronger actress and a sexier woman than Lana Turner, who took this
part in the “straight” Gene Kelly version from MGM in 1948!), along with an
almost unrecognizable John Carradine as Naveau — and though Gloria Stuart as
the Queen was O.K. rather than great, her presence here is welcome if only
because it puts the Ritz Brothers one degree of separation from Leonardo di
Caprio! As the good girl for D’Artagnan to fall in love with, Pauline Moore as
Lady Constance has a nice singing voice (considerably nicer than Don Ameche’s!)
and a quietly strong screen presence that’s welcome.

The Three Musketeers isn’t a bad movie at all; it’s just not great,
neither all that exciting from an action standpoint (despite some well-staged swordfights)
nor all that funny. Don Ameche’s singing voice — which I’d forgotten I’d heard
before in Alexander’s Ragtime Band — is, like the overall film, acceptable without being great; he doesn’t
attack the numbers with the panache of Lawrence Tibbett or Nelson Eddy but he isn’t so embarrassingly bad
as to be camp, either. As D’Artagnan he’s handsome and reliable — sort of like
Walter Abel in the then-most recent “straight” version of the story — his
performance “works” even though neither he nor Abel could compete with either
Fairbanks or Kelly in the role. The Ritz Brothers get two great comedy scenes:
one in which they literally upend Binnie Barnes and shake her to get an
important document she’s concealed between her breasts (they shake loose a lot of
romantic assignation letters before they get the key paper) and one in which
they become a percussion ensemble, clashing together cymbals attached to each
others’ bodies, to make so much noise that D’Artagnan won’t be caught while
he’s ransacking the palace for something or other. The big plot gimmick is that
no sooner have the Ritz Brothers assumed the identities of the real Musketeers
(Douglass Dumbrille as Athos, John “Dusty” King as Aramis and Russell Hicks as
Porthos, in case you cared), the King, Louis XIII (Joseph Schildkraut — it’s
nice to savor the irony of casting a Jewish actor and Yiddish Art Theatre vet
as the King of a country where Jews were unwelcome and various factions of
Christians massacred each other!), issues an edict that anyone wearing a
musketeer’s costume without official permission is to be put to death— which
means the Ritzes spend virtually the whole movie cowering in fear over being
thought out, while the writers throw them various complications that prevent
them from doffing the Musketeer drag and returning to their normal appearance.

It also doesn’t help that the songs aren’t that memorable — except for the
catchy one D’Artagnan sings as he rides his old plug horse through the French
countryside. I wondered why he kept singing “Walla, walla, walla, walla, walla”
until I looked the movie up both in the American Film Institute Catalog and on imdb.com and found the word was supposed to
be “Voilà.” The Three Musketeers is a nicely entertaining film but nothing to write home about, though
Charles was impressed that in the closing scene, with the Ritz Brothers exiting
with their backs to the camera, they’re all carrying actual muskets; one could
sit through a lot of the other versions of this story and not realize that
muskets were actually a primitive sort of firearm! Incidentally, imdb.com lists
versions of The Three Musketeers as early as 1903, 1914 and 1916 before the Fairbanks version of 1921
(and a French short made the same year); the first sound version was a four-hour French film in 1932 (the French were specializing
in these hyperthyroid adaptations of their national literature just then; the
French version of Jean Renoir’s Madame Bovary from 1934 was three hours long, though it was cut
to two hours when it was issued in the U.S.), followed by the 1935 RKO version,
this one, ones from 1942 and 1945, a few more French versions and some made for
TV in the 1950’s and 1960’s, then the Richard Lester version from 1973 with
Michael York as D’Artagnan (the most recent of the “major” versions of this
story, following the Fairbanks and Kelly films) and a few more from the 1990’s.

Thursday, December 26, 2013

I ran Charles the 1937 film Shall We Dance, a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical (the seventh in
the series) brought down by the tiredness of some of the series formulae but
enlivened considerably by a superb George and Ira Gershwin score that generated
three songs that have become standards — “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,”
“Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” and “They All Laughed” (the last my choice for
unofficial theme song of the AIDS dissident movement). Arlene Croce’s The
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book has a
good deal of scorn for this movie, not only for the central conceit — Astaire
plays Peter P. Peters of Philadelphia, PA, a dancer whose manager (Edward
Everett Horton at his absolute queeniest) has had the idea to sell him as a
ballet star by passing him off as the Moscow Ballet’s premier
danseur, Petrov — but also for the casting
of Harriet Hoctor as Astaire’s other dancing partner. “Not even in his satin premier
danseur tunic can Astaire be taken for a
ballet dancer, but Miss Hoctor can be taken for nothing human,” Croce wrote.
“She was a contortionist whose specialty, a horseshoe backbend on point, was
already well known to movie audiences. (In this position she would kick herself
in the head.)” Unlike those other movie contortionists, the Ross Sisters — who
did so much to liven up the otherwise dreary 1944 MGM musical Broadway
Rhythm — Hoctor is all too “serious” about
this move, and not only does she perform the maneuver exactly the way Croce
described it, director Mark Sandrich makes it worse by filming it, not from the
expected side angle, but dead on, with Hoctor starting out with her back to the
camera and then exposing first her face (upside down) and then her breasts,
which end up resembling two marshmallows on top of a vanilla ice cream sundae.
After she duly kicks herself in the head as promised — first with her right leg
and then with her left (or was it the other way around?) — Sandrich mercifully
cuts away. Shall We Dance is an
uneven movie — great stars, great supporting players (particularly the
marvelous Jerome Cowan as Rogers’ manager — he and Horton have a relationship
that verges as close to the homoerotic as the tight Production Code enforcement
of 1937 would allow!), great songs and a creaky, committee-made script (Lee
Loeb and Harold Buchman are credited with the story, P. J. Wolfson with its
“adaptation” and Allan Scott and Ernest Pagano with the actual screenplay — but
at its best it’s marvelous and a great deal of fun in the best Astaire-Rogers
tradition. — 9/21/98

•••••

Charles and I watched one of the films in Turner Classic
Movies’ last day of their “Star of the Month” tribute to Fred Astaire. It was
quite surprising that, for an Astaire tribute that ended on Christmas night,
they did not show Holiday Inn, but instead they decided to go with the five films
in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers canon they hadn’t run on the opening night
four weeks earlier: Top Hat, Swing Time, Shall We Dance, Carefree and The Barkleys of Broadway. The one we watched was Shall We Dance, made in 1937 and the seventh of the nine
Astaire-Rogers films made in the 1930’s for RKO (Barkleys was an MGM film made in 1949, a decade after the RKO
cycle, and in it Rogers was a last-minute replacement for Judy Garland, who had
one of her breakdowns and got fired from it). It was also a reunion between
Astaire and songwriters George and Ira Gershwin — Astaire and his sister Adele
had had some major hits with Gershwin musicals on stage in the 1920’s but they
hadn’t worked together on a film until this one. It’s an indication of how much
Gershwin’s star had fallen in the commercial worlds of music, movies and
theatre that George and Ira got only $50,000 to write the score for Shall
We Dance — a formidable sum but only half
what Fox had paid them six years earlier for the film Delicious. In the meantime Gershwin had had three consecutive
stage flops (Let ’Em Eat Cake, Pardon My English and his opera Porgy and Bess, in a problematical production by the Theatre Guild
with spoken dialogue replacing Gershwin’s original recitatives and one of the
score’s most powerful and wrenching numbers, “The Buzzard Song,” cut because
the Porgy, Todd Duncan, was performing the role eight times a week and leaving
it in would have wrecked his voice from the strain) and that had sent his
asking price way down. His billing, too; where the opening title of Delicious had advertised “JANET GAYNOR and CHARLES FARRELL in DELICIOUS
with GEORGE GERSHWIN MUSIC” (indicating
that Fox had paid the Gershwins $100,000 in hopes that their name would be box
office in itself), for Shall We Dance Astaire and Rogers got above-the-title billing while the Gershwins got
a title card to themselves but only in the middle of the ones for everyone
else. (When the names of George and Ira Gershwin appear on screen, the
soundtrack cuts in with a snatch of the Rhapsody in Blue, then as now George’s most famous composition.)

Shall
We Dance was also the last production
involving George Gershwin’s music to be premiered during his lifetime — before
his untimely death he’d finished the songs for Astaire’s next film, A
Damsel in Distress, and written about half
the projected score for the film The Goldwyn Follies (Vernon Duke finished the project after Gershwin’s
death), but he died two months before Damsel started shooting. He was not a happy camper about the movie; he wrote to a friend
in New York, “The picture does not take advantage of the songs as well as it
should. They literally throw one or two songs away without any plug. This is
mainly due to the structure of the story, which does not include any other
singers than Fred and Ginger, and the amount of singing one can stand of these
two is quite limited.” (Irving Berlin and Cole Porter both told interviewers
that they’d rather have a song of theirs introduced by Fred Astaire than anyone
else, but apparently Gershwin didn’t feel the same way — even though some of
his greatest and most enduring songs, both on stage and on film, were first
performed by Astaire.) He’s right; future generations have lamented that Harry
Woods’ “Sweet Leilani” won the 1937 Academy Award for Best Song over “They
Can’t Take That Away from Me,” but the performance of “They Can’t Take That
Away from Me” in Shall We Dance —
Astaire sings it to Rogers as they’re on a ferry to New Jersey, where they’re
going to get married because the world already thinks they are married, and therefore Rogers must publicly divorce
him so she can marry her millionaire boyfriend (which, of course, she doesn’t),
but they don’t dance to it and the great ballad is thrown away — shows why Academy voters rejected it.

Shall
We Dance has its problems — the story asks
us to suspend disbelief that ordinary common-Joe American Peter P. Peters (Fred
Astaire) has somehow managed to become a huge international ballet star under
the sobriquet “Petrov” (and while
it was actually fairly common for American ballet dancers to take Russian names
and pass themselves off as Russians, Astaire’s attempts at ballet illustrate
both his superb control over his body and his stylistic unsuitability for that
sort of dancing), and it’s structured so there are too many scenes in which he
and Rogers’ character, musical star Linda Keene, hate each other and not enough
in which they love each other — but it’s actually a quite witty film, with a
great Gershwin score, a witty, wisecrack-filled script by Allan Scott and
Ernest Pagano, and an interesting plot conceit: the reluctant Petrov falls in
love with Linda (“I haven’t even met her, but I’d sort of like to marry her —
in fact, I think I will”) as well as with her style of dancing (there’s a nice
scene at the beginning where Astaire takes a break from ballet rehearsals,
closets himself in a secret studio, and does a hot tap routine to a swing
record of Gershwin’s “Beginner’s Luck” — the record sticks in several places
and ultimately winds down, as often happened in those days because a lot of
record players were still powered by clockwork). The film starts in Paris,
where Petrov wants to stay because Linda is performing at a local nightclub —
only he overhears that she’s sailing that night for New York, whereupon he
tells his imperious manager Jeffrey Baird (Edward Everett Horton at his
dippiest — I hadn’t realized before last night how much Horton resembled George
W. Bush, particularly in that deer-in-the-headlights look both men had at their
moments of crisis) that he’s leaving that night on the same liner.

She too has
an imperious manager, Arthur Miller (the marvelous Jerome Cowan, playing a
queeny stereotype quite far from his usual casting — Cowan was a very
underrated performer and his reputation hasn’t been helped by the fact that his
most famous role was as Miles Archer in the 1941 Maltese Falcon, in which he’s killed in the first reel), who’s
worried that her impending retirement to marry a millionaire is going to kill
him financially; when she says of her impending nuptials, “I’m facing happiness
for the first time,” he says, “And I’m facing bankruptcy … for the third time.” (One wonders why he doesn’t sell his backers
25,000 percent of Linda’s next show and deliberately make it so bad it flops.)
On the liner, Petrov — who’s already alienated Linda by visiting her room and
playing the haughty Russian artiste
pose to the max (when she asks if he has another name besides Petrov, he says
in an hilariously bad “Russian” accent, “Like Caesar, only Napoleon, and just
Garbo, so Petrov, she is enough, too”) — cruises her on deck as she’s walking a
dog (to a piece by George Gershwin variously called “Promenade,” “Walking the
Dog” and “Strictly Instrumental,” which Michael Tilson Thomas had transcribed
for his 1985 Gershwin album and which now regularly appears on programs of
Gershwin’s concert music). The ship’s radio operator hears a rumor that Petrov
and Linda are secretly married (there are at least two sequences in this movie
in which various shipboard and hotel officials hear discussions of Astaire’s
and/or Rogers’ relationships and, though the truth is both morally and
Production Code-wise innocuous, the Scott-Pagano dialogue makes it sound
considerably racier than it is, leaving the eavesdroppers shocked) and it
becomes an international news story (“It must have been a slow news year,” I
joked), leading to that odd scene in which the two hatebirds comment that
they’re the only people in the world who don’t think they’re married to each other, and Linda hits
on the solution of actually getting married so they can then get divorced.

Shall
We Dance is a bizarrely mixed film whose
biggest problem is that, in a plot centered around the clash between ballet and
popular dancing, the pop side is represented by Astaire and Rogers at their
peak as a team (even though, of the three numbers they have together only one,
“They All Laughed,” is actually a dance; the others are that instrumental
dog-walk on the deck of the ocean liner taking them from France to the U.S.,
and a roller-skating sequence to “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”) and the
ballet side is represented by hideous choreography by Harry Losee (fresh from doing
Sonja Henie’s skating routines in the film Thin Ice) that Arlene Croce, in The Fred Astaire
and Ginger Rogers Book, derisively called
“turned-in toe dancers rumbl[ing] around in clumps.” With the plot temporarily
splitting Astaire and Rogers in time for Petrov’s big opening at Arthur
Miller’s rooftop nightclub (the first rooftop nightclub had been opened by
Florenz Ziegfeld in 1912 and the most popular — or at least best-known —
example was the New York Rainbow Room owned by NBC, RKO’s parent company)— he’s
accepted Miller’s offer after New York’s Metropolitan Ballet has fired him for
his “scandalous” behavior with Linda Keene — Astaire’s dance partner for the
big number at the end is someone or something called Harriet Hoctor. Croce is
withering about her: “Not even in his satin premier danseur tunic can Astaire be taken for a ballet dancer, but
Miss Hoctor can be taken for nothing human. She was a contortionist whose
specialty, a horseshoe backbend on point, was already well known to movie
audiences. (In this position she would kick herself in the head.)” And while
directors of her other movies (there were other Harriet Hoctor movies, which is rather amazing in itself)
usually shot her self-kicking sequence in profile, the director of Shall
We Dance, Mark Sandrich (making his fourth
of five movies with Astaire and Rogers), shoots it full on, making Hoctor look
like a submarine suddenly upending itself to do a crash dive, with her breasts
as the conning towers. Nonetheless, there are quite a few interesting elements
in Shall We Dance, including the
queeniest set of supporting performances in an Astaire-Rogers movie since The
Gay Divorcée — in one audacious sequence
Jerome Cowan gets Edward Everett Horton drunk on champagne and damned if it
doesn’t it look like he’s getting him plastered so he can have his wicked way
with him! — and a series of astounding visual representations of Rogers that
form a probably unintentional but nonetheless amusing spoof of celebrity
culture.

We first see Ginger Rogers in this film as a dancer in a flip-book of
photographs sold at the club where she performs, and which Astaire shows to
Horton to illustrate the woman he hasn’t met yet but thinks he’s going to
marry. (In the original script there was an even more elaborate introduction;
Astaire was going to mention to Horton that he’d seen a poster of his dream
girl, and in a sequence apparently patterned on the beautiful “A Needle in a
Haystack” scene in The Gay Divorcée
he was going to dance through the streets of Paris until he came upon the
theatre where she was performing, which would be showing a film of her dance on
a small monitor to let audiences know what they would be in for if they paid to
see her, and then the film would dissolve to her actual dance with her partner
— only the bean-counters at RKO decided this wouldn’t be worth the extra
$50,000 it would have added to the budget, while the song the Gershwins wrote
for it, “Hi-Ho,” went into storage and wasn’t unearthed and published until
1967.) Then there’s a life-size model of Rogers of almost unearthly realism,
which Miller and a photographer in his employ sneak into Astaire’s bedroom and
take a picture of him with the model Rogers in his bed, then release it to the
papers to establish that Petrov and Linda are in fact married to each other.
And there’s the final sequence in which Astaire decides that if he can’t dance
with Rogers in his big number, he’ll dance with images of her; he has
photographic masks of her face made up and has every chorus girl in his “Ballet
Meets Broadway” routine hold one in front of her face as she dances the
routine. Ginger shows up with her rich idiot fiancé, sneaks backstage, dresses
in a chorus girl’s costume and joins the line, at one point letting her mask
slip so Astaire’s character will know it’s the real Rogers onstage behind one of the Rogers masks — but
which one? He dances his way through the chorus line, “unmasking” each one in
turn. “If this were a Romantic ballet,” Croce wrote, “he would have gone on
hunting forever, but the music races on in a new key, the lights come up
bright, and after a bit of dancing (a very little bit), the movie ends with,
‘Ho, ho, ho, who’s got the last laugh now?’” It seems odd that the “Promenade”
has been transcribed and included in concert programs of Gershwin’s music while
this final scene — with its daringly dissonant music when it isn’t incorporating the melodies of the film’s songs —
hasn’t been; it would be nice to hear it outside the distraction of Losee’s
boring choreography. — 12/26/13

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Charles ran me a half-hour
cartoon short of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant from 1971 which was a special favorite of his, and
which he thought was unique even though, when I searched for it on imdb.com,
seven other versions came up, including some made for television (notably a
1939 version from the BBC’s experimental TV production group), and a version
dated 2013, though that one is described as “a contemporary fable about two
scrappy 13-year-old working-class friends in the UK who seek fortune by getting
involved with a local scrap dealer and criminal, leading to tragic
consequences.” Exactly what that has to do with Wilde’s story, if anything, is
something I won’t know until I see it. In any event, this Selfish Giant is a quite charming, if rather crudely animated,
26-minute cartoon offered by, of all companies, Reader’s Digest, based on a
Wilde story that’s a pretty obvious parable about the joys of altruism and the
dangers of selfishness — the sort of children’s story you might expect from an
author who wrote an essay called “The Soul of Man under Socialism” that clearly
came from a point of view that regarded socialism as a good thing.

The story deals with a giant (though given
the scale with which he was drawn as compared to the human characters he’s not that giant — more like about 12 feet — and his
appearance, particularly his facial structure and his clothes, made me think
the animators were deliberately copying the famous Frankenstein monster makeup
from the Universal films) who leaves his castle and garden for seven years to
visit the Cornish Ogre, an equally jumbo-sized humanoid who lives on an island.
When he returns, he finds that children have made it a habit to play in his
beautiful garden. Being selfish, he’s horrified by this and immediately puts up
a “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted” sign, walls off his castle and garden, and
makes sure the kids can’t come in and play. He’s visited by Winter, the North
Wind, Jack Frost and Hail, all of whom camp out in his garden and turn it into
a year-round wasteland of frost, cold and other unpleasantnesses. Then one
child manages to discover a crack in the wall and sneak in, and the Selfish
Giant takes pity on him, installs him at the top of a tree in the garden, and
by his example the child attracts Spring and more clement weather beings and
turns the garden beautiful again. The Giant tears down the wall and the sign,
lets the children play in his garden again, but is broken-hearted because he
never again sees the child who sneaked in and softened his attitude in the
first place — until the very end of the story, in which the mystery child literally turns out to be Jesus Christ (we can tell by the
wounds on his hands and feet left by the Crucifixion), who tells the giant,
“You let me play once in your garden; today you shall come with me to my
garden, which is Paradise.” Then the giant is allowed to die (the story has
taken place over decades and by then he’s quite old) in peace.

The 1971
adaptation is a bit on the cutesy-poo side for me, complete with a couple of
highly sappy songs that sound like cross-breeds between Disney musicals and
soft-rock, though Charles assured me (and I just confirmed by looking up the
original online) that most of the third-person narration we hear throughout the
film comes from Oscar Wilde. It’s a genuinely charming tale, effectively if not
especially creatively told here, quite moving in its way even though more than
a bit didactic. Indeed, while we were watching it I couldn’t help imagine the
story as Ayn “Virtue of Selfishness” Rand would have written it; in her version,
of course, the giant’s brilliant entrepreneurial spirit would have ensured that
his garden blossomed while everyone else’s stayed stuck in winter, and at the
end he would emerge from behind the wall and say, “If you want to play in my
garden, you will have to do so on my terms.” (One quirky fact about the film
listed on imdb.com: the movie was also released in a French-language version,
and for the French soundtrack narrator Paul Hecht was replaced by, of all
people, Charles Aznavour. If only they’d tapped him for the songs as well!)

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Judy Garland was the star
of the movie Charles and I watched last night, In the Good Old Summertime, which I hadn’t seen in some time; released in
1949, it was her next-to-last film under contract to MGM, and while virtually
all her other movies of the period either were abandoned and recast with others
(Annie Get Your Gun with
Betty Hutton, The Barkleys of Broadway with Ginger Rogers, Royal Wedding with Jane Powell) or put both her co-stars and the behind-the-camera
personnel through the trials and tribulations of sheer hell before they were
finished (The Pirate, Easter Parade, Summer Stock), this one seems to have been an easygoing
experience for her and the other people involved — including several she worked
with only this one time: co-star Van Johnson (he’s billed second and is the
only other cast member listed above the title), featured player Buster Keaton
and director Robert Z. Leonard. Leonard had begun his career in the silent era
directing his then-wife, Mae Murray, at Universal; they both obtained contracts
at MGM and then broke up. Murray married one of the Mdivani brothers,
scapegrace princes from Europe who ran through their celebrity wives’ money,
while Leonard stayed on at MGM, directed Norma Shearer (wife of MGM production
head Irving Thalberg) in her Academy Award-winning performance in The
Divorcée, helmed the big musical The
Great Ziegfeld in 1936 (dully; the
director the film really needed
was John Murray Anderson, who’d directed most of the Ziegfeld Follies on stage and had also made the awesome 1930 musical
The King of Jazz) and the following year
made one authentic masterpiece; Maytime, the third and (to my mind) the best of the Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson
Eddy cycle. Then it was back to the hack salt mines, doing a wide range of film
types including the quite credible 1949 film noir The Bribe (though when I watched it last I called it “a
mediocre movie with a great one inside trying to escape”), and taking on a
long-simmering project at MGM that had originally been a charming 1940 comedy
directed by Ernst Lubitsch called The Shop Around the Corner. Lubitsch had run afoul of MGM’s boss, Louis B.
Mayer, in 1939 by making Ninotchka, a sophisticated, satirical comedy about Soviet Russia starring Greta
Garbo as a commissar who comes to Paris to sell some of the Imperial crown
jewels to get foreign exchange for the Soviet government, and is seduced away
from her principles by gigolo Melvyn Douglas. It made money, but Mayer was fond
of pointing out that a Hardy Family movie that had been released at the same time
grossed just as much as Ninotchka and turned a bigger profit because it was so much cheaper to make.

Lubitsch got the message and looked for a story he could shoot that would have
the kind of homey “family values” Mayer liked in his projects, which he found
in a play by Miklós László called Parfumerie. Lubitsch’s writer, Samson Raphaelson, changed the
business around which the plot revolves from a perfume store to a music store
but kept the basic plot premise intact: a young man who works at a music store
(James Stewart) is having an pen-pal relationship with a woman he’s never met
and whose name he does not know. The music store’s owner (Frank Morgan — yes,
the Wizard of Oz himself!) hires a new female staff member (Margaret Sullavan)
and she and Stewart hate each other at first sight — only, you guessed it,
she’s his mysterious pen-pal, and the whole running time is taken up keeping
both them and us in suspense as to what’s going to happen when these two people
who can’t stand each other in the flesh realize that they’re the people who
have fallen in love by letter. (Later, in the 1990’s, there was a third
version, You’ve Got Mail!, which seized on the Internet as a way to update the story and was
actually pitched as “The Shop Around the Corner with e-mail!”) MGM seemed to be looking for a
musical version of The Shop Around the Corner, with its turn-of-the-century setting, almost as
soon as Meet Me in St. Louis became the biggest hit MGM had produced to date. (Gone With the Wind was even bigger, but it was a Selznick
International production that MGM had merely co-financed and distributed in
exchange for supplying Clark Gable to play Rhett Butler.) Though MGM announced
the project for a dizzying array of stars in both the female and male leads —
among the candidates to play the woman were June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven,
while Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly and Peter Lawford were considered for the man —
the people they ended up with, Judy Garland and Van Johnson, were near-perfect
for the roles. The script was worked up from Raphaelson’s The Shop Around
the Corner by the husband-and-wife
team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich along with Ivan Tors (whose
presence puts Judy Garland one degree of separation from Flipper!), and they
gave MGM pretty much what they wanted: another homey, family-oriented musical
drawing on the actual early 20th-century songbook.

In the Good
Old Summertime is what I’ve taken to
calling a “monomusical” since only one cast member sings, but even though Van
Johnson (who did have something of a voice
— he replaced Gene Kelly in the original Broadway production of Pal Joey, much to lyricist Lorenz Hart’s disappointment)
doesn’t sing he’s a surprisingly good co-star for Judy. The two make themselves
believable as both lovebirds and hatebirds, and they have an easygoing
chemistry that gives the musical an old-fashioned charm. In the Good Old
Summertime also benefits from glowing
Technicolor (The Shop Around the Corner had been in black-and-white), though so many of the interiors are
burnished brown that at times this looks like a more recent past-is-brown
“color” film. And most of all, it has Judy Garland, who despite the troubles
she was going through at this time — her fraught relationship with MGM and
fragile marriage-on-the-rocks with director Vincente Minnelli (who had, on
Judy’s psychiatrist’s orders, stopped directing her films in a failed attempt
to save their off-screen relationship) — turns in one of her most remarkable
performances, showing herself capable of physical comedy, witty repartée and,
of course, incredible singing. Her voice shows traces of the muscle-bound
quality that would afflict it in the post-MGM years, but for the most part it’s
still a lovely instrument that does justice to the songs, especially the scene
in the beer garden where the store owner, Otto Oberkugen (S. Z. Sakall in Frank
Morgan’s old role — he’s even identified on his credit with his nickname
“Cuddles”), is throwing a party and Judy harmonizes with four male singers on
“Play That Barbershop Chord” and then does an uptempo belt version of “I Don’t
Care,” the star-making song for vaudevillian Eva Tanguay. And In the Good
Old Summertime is also notable as the
first film in which Liza Minnelli appeared — at least visibly; Judy had made Till
the Clouds Roll By while she was pregnant
with Liza and, despite their best efforts to cover it up, some intimations that
she was “with child” are visible in the final cut — at the very end, when she
shows up at a park in the company of Judy and Van Johnson, playing their daughter.

In the Good Old Summertime was made at a time when Judy Garland was not only fed up with MGM
generally but in particular was upset at being thrown one big period musical
after another when she desperately wanted to play more sophisticated roles in
stories set in her own time. She’d wanted to make Yolanda and the Thief with Minnelli but got assigned The Harvey Girls instead (one time when the studio was right and a
star was wrong: The Harvey Girls was an enormous hit and Yolanda an enormous flop), and she got In the Good Old Summertime after having one of her nervous breakdowns and
being bounced out of The Barkleys of Broadway (which became, instead of a reunion between Fred
Astaire and Judy Garland after their joint success in Easter Parade, a reunion between Astaire and Ginger Rogers 10
years after their last RKO film together, The Story of Vernon and Irene
Castle) — indeed, this film was
cut so much to the Meet Me in
St. Louis formula that it even
features Judy singing a Christmas-themed song to a pre-pubescent girl
(supposedly someone her aunt, whom she lives with, is baby-sitting), though the
song is a simple piece called “Merry Christmas” by Fred Spielman and Janice
Torre, and is hardly on the level of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (a
masterpiece that no one has sung
as well as Garland did). One surprise in this film is the opening narration
delivered, in character, by Van Johnson, over a sequence that dissolves from
Chicago (the film’s setting) as it was in 1949 to the representation of it half
a century earlier — the text is so much like the opening of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (and the Booth Tarkington source novel) I suspect
at least one of the writers was consciously copying it even though usually
Welles’ name and anything he’d done was persona non grata at MGM. Another MGM bête noire who got an unexpected rehabilitation on this film was Buster Keaton,
who’d been hired back by the studio as a gagman in the early 1940’s but hadn’t
appeared on screen in an MGM movie since he was fired after What, No Beer? in 1933. Keaton was asked to come up with a way
for a character accidentally to break a violin (a key plot point), and he did
such a spectacular pratfall director Leonard decided to have him play the
character — and he also worked out a marvelous slapstick sequence when Van
Johnson’s and Judy Garland’s characters meet early on; indeed, he had enough
creative involvement in this film that imdb.com lists him as an uncredited
co-director!

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Charles and I watched the DVD edition of the latest X-Men
movie, The Wolverine — a flawed but
surprisingly interesting and almost tragic superhero movie which was released
earlier this year as a summer blockbuster but didn’t do well at the box office.
One can readily see why; it’s true that Marvel Comics, which introduced the
X-Men characters in 1963 (I hadn’t realized it was that early until I saw the
recent PBS documentary on the history of superheroes), really began the whole
idea of the angst-ridden
superhero — the being with superpowers who also longed for a normal life, to
the point of thinking and sometimes even asking the universe to take this cup
from their lips. But they’ve rarely taken it so far as they did here, or been
so relentless about it. The premise of the X-Men movies is that a certain
number of people are born with superhero mutations — though Wolverine seems to
have acquired his via an accident
in which his body was injected with a metal called adamantium, which has made
him immortal, given him the power to heal just about any injury he suffers, and
also has allowed him to grow three fearsome metal blades that sprout from his
knuckles (not his fingernails)
and make him an incredibly effective combat weapon, since the super-strong
metal can slice through walls and other metal objects as well as the bodies of
his attackers.

The group X-Men movies have centered around the uncertain
affiliations between these mutants — some of whom have reacted by becoming
antisocial villains and others by becoming good guys who try to fight them —
but Wolverine’s solo movies (of which this is at least the second — the first
was X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a
clunky title but also quite a good film) have cast him as an angst-ridden version of the Lone Ranger who travels the
world over looking for a place where he can feel at home and a woman he can
love. Of course, despite his success in fighting evil he never really
accomplishes either of those tasks. The Wolverine is set mostly in Japan, and casts Logan (Hugh
Jackman in his sixth appearance in the role), Wolverine’s non-hero alternate
identity, as a U.S. servicemember in World War II who’s taken prisoner by the
enemy and held in a prison camp in Nagasaki. When the city is bombarded by an
atomic attack — the genuine one that took place August 9, 1945, three days
after the better-known one on Hiroshima — three junior Japanese officers in
charge of the camp commit suicide rather than face dishonor, but the
commandant, Yashida (Ken Yamamura), is rescued by Logan. The two survive the
attack by hiding at the bottom of a long pipe in the ground that apparently
serves as the only entrance and egress to Logan’s cell — and then the film
flashes forward from 1945 to 2013, where Logan is wandering aimlessly around
Alaska following the death of his girlfriend, Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) — an
event depicted in the 2006 film X-Men: The Last Stand, so far the only one in the cycle Charles and I
haven’t seen. He’s met by Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a red-haired female martial
artist and an emissary of Yashida’s company — since the war he’s become a
billionaire and owns a high-tech corporation — who tells him that Yashida
(played in the modern footage by Haruhiko Yamanouchi) is about to die of natural
causes and wants to say goodbye to his old friend Logan before he croaks. Only
what he really wants is to steal
Logan’s superpowers and make himself immortal.

He’s got help in doing that from
another mutant, Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova), whose superpower is being able
to absorb every poisonous substance in the world into her own body and then
breathe or otherwise transfer them out again to anyone else, thereby either
killing or incapacitating them. He’s also got the assistance of Shingen
(Hiroyuki Sanada) and Noburo (Brian Tee) — the latter is Japan’s attorney
general but, like a lot of real-life politicians, is looking to be in the good
graces of a 1-percenter so he’ll have a lucrative career when he leaves (or
gets thrown out of) office. What Yashida doesn’t reckon with is his own
granddaughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto), who inherits the company when Yashida dies
and falls in love with Logan. It turns out, this being a superhero movie, that
Yashida isn’t dead; his body has
been kept alive artificially, partly by the share of Logan’s superpowers that
Viper has been able to extract from him and insert into Yashida’s corpse to
revive him, and partly due to the Silver Samurai, a huge robot made of
adamantium which Yashida operates from inside, and which since it’s made of the
same stuff that gave Logan his powers can off him once and for all. The plot
leaves a lot of room for the typical, highly baroque and elaborate action
scenes you expect in a comic-book movie — all of which are set in high-tech
environments looking nothing like anything you or I are likely to encounter in
our own lives — but there’s also some real emotional conflict here. Logan
begins the movie in full death-wish mode, lamenting the curse of his own
immortality and sounding an awful lot like a cross between Jesus Christ and
Wagner’s Wotan, but no sooner has he realized that Yashida wants to take over
his immortality than Logan decides he wants to live after all, even if that
means that at the end of the film he abandons Mariko and hits the road again,
Lone Ranger-style — and in one of the post-credits sequences Marvel movies have
become famous for, he’s greeted at the airport by Professor X (Anthony Hopkins)
and Magneto (Ian McKellen), setting up a couple of upcoming new entries in the
group version of the X-Men cycle, Days of Future Past (2014) and Apocalypse (2016).

I’m not sure stretching the cycle that far
is all that good an idea, and I’m not sure including Wolverine in the group
movies is that good an idea either — he’s really much more powerful as a solo
character — but The Wolverine, as
much as it sometimes seems on the verge of collapsing from its weight and
darkness, is really a surprisingly intense and moving film, especially for a genre that really doesn’t truck much with sophisticated
human emotions. It probably helps that the script was written by only two
people (Mark Bomback and Scott Frank) and also that the director, James
Mangold, is not a superhero
specialist; his best-known previous credits are Girl, Interrupted (about a mentally ill teenager), the Johnny Cash
biopic Walk the Line and the
recent remake of the 1950’s Western 3:10 to Yuma — which means he isn’t burned out on the genre and instead could look at it with fresh eyes
(literally and figuratively).
Though the relentless past-is-brown, present-is-brown, everything-is-brown cinematography of Ross Emery makes the film
wearing at times, and a few of the action set-pieces (including an otherwise
exciting fight-to-the-finish on top of a speeding bullet train) suffer from the
obvious digitization of the images, The Wolverine is actually a quite impressive superhero movie and a
worthy entry in a cycle whose central premise (mutants living in the “normal”
world and having to cope with the often deadly prejudices against them) has
been analogized to both the African-American and Queer civil-rights struggles;
apparently much of the original fan base for the X-Men comic magazine was 1960’s and 1970’s Queer people
identifying with the mutants’ dilemma: stay in the closet or come out?

Saturday, December 21, 2013

I ran a Lifetime movie from
the backfiles, The Alphabet Killer, which I recorded last March around the same time as Lifetime aired Romeo
Killer: The Chris Porco Story— which they were promoting
incessantly during the showing of The Alphabet Killer, pushing the fact that the real Chris Porco had
filed suit to block the screening of that film and had actually won in district
court before an appeals court ruled that this was precisely the sort of
prior-restraint censorship the First Amendment was designed to prevent, and the
ban was lifted so they could show the film. The Alphabet Killer was also based on a true story — the mysterious
murders of three pre-pubescent girls in and around Rochester, New York in the
early 1970’s — which got the nicknames “the alphabet murders” and “the
double-initial murders” because not only were the victims young girls whose
first and last names began with the same letter, their bodies were dumped in
towns whose names began with the same letter as the victims’ names. According
to the usual online sources, the Rochester “alphabet murders” have never been
solved, though a later series of four “alphabet murders” in California has been solved — the convicted killer was a man named
Joseph Naso who moved from upstate New York to California in the mid-1970’s —
which leads some people to suspect that the Rochester murders may have been committed
by Naso as well. Then again, Naso’s victims were adult prostitutes instead of
little girls, and it’s rare for a serial killer to change his victim profile
that radically. Besides, as some online sources pointed out, both Naso and the
Rochester killer could have copied the gimmick from Agatha Christie’s suspense
novel The ABC Murders.

But The
Alphabet Killer is hardly your
standard-issue Lifetime true-crime drama — indeed, it’s at least as enjoyable
if you don’t know it’s at least
nominally based on actual crimes — instead it’s a psychological horror-thriller
whose central character is not the killer but the lead police detective on the
case, Megan Paige (an absolutely first-rate performance by Eliza Dushku), who
when the film begins is living with fellow cop Kenneth Shine (Cary Elwes) when
the two pull the case of the first “alphabet murder.” (Incidentally, the real
first victim was 10 years old but the actress playing her here, Bailey Garno,
is 15.) Megan, it turns out, has a long history of mental illness but has never
been diagnosed before; it’s been responsible for many of her successes as a
homicide detective because it’s enabled her to get into the head space of the
criminal she was looking for and thereby figure out who he or she was. But when
she starts investigating this killing she finds the victim’s ghost literally haunting her, and ultimately within two acts she’s
so frustrated by her inability either to crack the case or to sleep that she
attempts suicide by slashing her wrists. Ken rescues her but she ends up in a
mental hospital being treated by Dr. Ellis Parks (Carl Lumbly, who for some
reason is made up to look less like an African-American human than a character
from Planet of the Apes), and
though she’s allowed to return to the police force she’s only given a desk job
in the records department and isn’t permitted to have a gun. Nonetheless, when
additional “alphabet” killings start occurring, she starts investigating them
whether she’s officially allowed to or not — thereby creating problems with
Ken, who’s no longer her boyfriend but is still on the force and is, in fact,
her superior officer. Eventually police think they have the Alphabet Killer
trapped in an attic, where she’s holding Elizabeth Eckers (Sarah Anderson) and
her father hostage — only not only is Eckers a sexually mature adult, she’s
always been called “Beth” and therefore doesn’t fit the double-initial pattern.
In a scene writer Tom Malloy probably copied, consciously or unconsciously,
from the end of Rebel Without a Cause Megan goes up the stairs to the attic and talks the suspect into giving
up his gun, only when the man appears at the attic window two of the officers
staking out the building fire their guns and blow him away.

The Rochester police consider the alphabet
cases closed, but of course Megan knows better; she discovers that all the
girls attended the same church, and her suspicion falls first on a priest
there, Father McQuarrie (Rocco Sisto), though we’ve already been given an
intimation that the real killer is Richard Ledge (Timothy Hutton), a member of
the therapy group Megan is attending. Yes, there’s the minor little detail that
Ledge is in a wheelchair when he attends the meetings, and the killer was
obviously someone who could walk, but as anyone who’s seen virtually any 1930’s
movie involving a wheelchair could have guessed, he really is the killer; he’s simply faked being disabled and needing the chair. (Virtually
all movie characters you saw in wheelchairs before 1938 didn’t actually need
them; the breakthrough finally came when Lionel Barrymore’s chronic arthritis got
so bad he needed a wheelchair in real life, so MGM started casting him as
people who needed wheelchairs.) He abducts Megan and takes her to the Genesee
River, intending to inject her with propofol, throw her into the river and let
the water and the currents do their work — but instead she manages to escape,
get to her gun (which she’s not supposed to be carrying at all) — or was it his gun? Director Rob Schmidt’s staging of the final
scene was a bit ambiguous ­— and blast away at him so he falls into the river. His body is never recovered,
and the police have already closed the case, so Megan goes back to her desk job
and, as the closing credits inform us, “In 2006, police exhumed a fireman’s
body and posthumously cleared him as a suspect. To date, the Alphabet Killer
has not been found.” (So this is another story, like Edgar Allan Poe’s The
Mystery of Marie Roget and
James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia, that gives us a fictitious solution to a famous unsolved real-life
crime.)

What makes this one special is the relentlessly Gothic visual style of
Rob Schmidt’s direction, the obsessiveness of Tom Malloy’s script, and above
all the magnificent acting of Eliza Dushku as Megan: she perfectly captures the
inner conflict between the controlled cop and the madwoman, and is at her best
moments when she’s trying to appear calm and collected and inside is seething with trauma and
fear. There’s one remarkable scene in which she gives a passionate kiss to one
of her fellow (male) officers — and when he asks her afterwards, “Did you mean
that?,” she says, “Probably not,” leaving him disappointed because it’s clear
the answer he was hoping for was
yes. That gimmick of the villain faking disability is so old it’s groan-inducing, but otherwise The
Alphabet Killer is well above the Lifetime
norm (it apparently was filmed for Showtime pay-cable and then released to
Lifetime in an edited version with typical deletions like the “God-“ from
“Goddamn”), a genuinely moving film with a first-rate performance by the female
lead. This should have been a star-making
role for Dushku (indeed, one could readily imagine it being a series!), but
somehow she’s got stuck hovering at the edge of the “A”-list even though she’s
been in feature films with such “A”-listers as Robert De Niro and Leonardo
DiCaprio!